Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is an award-winning author of 5 published novels and several short stories. Born and raised in Senegal, Sarr relocated to France to pursue his education.
Like Nobel Prize-winning Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sarr explores humanity and his homeland using literature and fiction.
In 2021 Sarr won France’s most prestigious award for literature, the Prix Goncourt. His latest novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), won him the prize.
Award-winning literature from Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Sarr published his first short story, La Cale (The Hold) in 2014. La Cale describes the journey of a doctor on a slave ship. He won the Prix Stéphane-Hessel for Young Francophone Writing that same year.
The author released his debut novel, Terre ceinte (Earth Encircled), in 2015. The book takes place in a Sahelian village under Islamic jihadi control. Terre ceinte received the Swiss literary prize Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma. The story also won the French Grand prix du roman métis for humanistic French language novels.
Silence du chœur (Silence of the Choir) (2017) encapsulates the everyday life of African immigrants in Sicily. The novel won the prix littérature monde at the Saint-Malo Étonnants Voyageurs festival. The book also won the 2018 Prix du roman métis des lecteurs of Saint-Denis de La Réunion.
The novelist released De purs hommes (Pure Men) in 2018. De purs hommes follows a young literature professor in Senegal. He witnesses the hanging of a young man at a cemetery after a video went viral. The professor soon becomes obsessed with finding the answers to this event, discovering the hanged man’s identity, family, and past.
Sarr published the award-winning La plus secrète mémoire des hommes with Editions Philippe Rey in 2021.
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr pursued his education in France
Sarr was born in Dakar, Senegal in 1990 and raised in Diourbel. He belongs to the West African ethnoreligious group Serer. Sarr is the eldest of seven children. His father is a physician.
As a child, Sarr loved to read. His favorite authors include Sembène Ousmane, Malick Fall, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The young author began to write “very bad poems,” in school, he told Jeune Afrique.
Sarr attended the prestigious Prytanée militaire in St. Louis. He completed secondary school in France, where he took literary preparatory classes. Next, the novelist went on to study at the prestigious School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. Sarr focused his thesis there on Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“I didn’t finish my thesis, because I started writing a lot at that time, and fiction prevailed,” Sarr told Liberation.
Sarr wins the Prix Goncourt
Sarr won the 2021 Prix Goncourt for his novel La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men). The Académie Goncourt awards the prize to the author of “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year.”
“I feel, quite simply, enormous joy,” Sarr said at the Drouant restaurant where the award was announced in Paris, according to The Guardian.
The novel follows a young Senegalese writer in Paris. He soon discovers a 1938 masterpiece and sets out to find the work’s mysterious author. The story is inspired by the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem who won the 1968 Prix Renaudot but fled France after being accused of plagiarism.
“It’s at once a police investigation but also an investigation into genealogy, politics, aesthetics – as well as questions like, what does it mean to be a writer and to write? This is really a book critic’s book,” the American Library in Paris’ programmes manager Alice McCrum described on France 24.
“It’s a hymn to literature,” said jury member Philippe Claudel.
The French literary organization’s Prix Goncourt is the most prestigious of six major French literary awards. Sarr is the first from sub-Saharan Africa to win the prize. He is also the youngest since 1976, at just 31 years old. The novel was additionally shortlisted for two other awards: the prix Femina and prix Médicis.
While the prize money is only €10, the award guarantees high book sales, as well as recognition for the author and publisher. Previously, winners of the prize include Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Duras.
La plus secrète mémoire des hommes is available in French on Amazon. Brotherhood, the English translation of his debut novel, is available here.
